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Coca-Cola and Pepsi compete for campus beverage contract

With nearly one month left before UC Berkeley’s current beverage contract is set to expire, two companies vying to enter into a beverage contract with the campus — and gain the exclusive beverage sales rights which accompany it — responded to a request for proposal that campus stakeholders released in May.

Rather than accepting offers from many companies before entering a protracted process of call, tweak and response, stakeholders released the minimum requirements necessary for beverage companies bidding for a contract in an expedited request for proposal process.

Due to the extent of requests as well as a stipulation that bidders must illustrate experience with other accounts of comparable size, small contenders were weeded out early, leaving only Coca-Cola Co. — the company in the current campus contract, which is set to expire Aug. 3 — and PepsiCo Inc., the only other player of comparable size, to respond to the request for proposal.

The four campus units comprising the contract’s stakeholders — the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics, ASUC Auxiliary, Residential and Student Service Programs and the Recreational Sports Facility — stand to gain much should the minimum requirements outlined in the request for proposal be met.

The proposal’s minimum requirements included a $1.3 million annual sponsorship fee to be paid to the campus stakeholders, as well as $15,000 paid annually to the campus sustainability program, $40,000 worth of product donations and $235,000 in marketing and promotion funding to support recycling programs, student groups, the ASUC’s SUPERB entertainment series and other campus-sponsored events, according to the request for proposal.

The $1.3 million sponsorship represents a figure of $685,000 more than the average amount paid to the campus annually by Coca-Cola in the previous contract. If this base requirement is met, the new contract’s total worth would be more than twice that of the current contract.

Absent from the request for proposal were the volume incentives that figured prominently into the current contract with Coca-Cola.

Furiousjack- what about UC Berklee’s sense of justice and fair trade for the other beverage providers in the area? This bid requirement amounts to extortion and probably exceeds the revenue generated by the machines.

Furiousjack

How can UC-Berkeley even consider offering Coca-Cola another
contract? Doesn’t the university believe in justice? Doesn’t this University
have a conscience? Coca-Cola is involved in the most deplorable labor, human rights
and environmental crimes, perpetrated on a worldwide scale. These abuses are well
documented in two recent books; The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth behind The
World’s Favorite Soft Drink by Michael Blanding (Penguin Group, Sept. 2010)
and Belching Out The Devil: Global Adventures With Coca-Cola (Mark
Thomas, Nation Books, 2008). Coca-Cola’s abuses are also detailed in two
feature-length documentaries; The Coca-Cola Case (National Film Board of
Canada, 2010, http://www.thecoca-colacase.org/)
and Dispatches: Mark Thomas on Coca-Cola, which aired during primetime
on national television in the UK in 2007. The most impressive accounting of
Coke’s crimes worldwide can be found @ http://www.killercoke.org.

If the information
contained in the books, documentaries and killercoke.org are untrue, than why
doesn’t the company sue the authors, publishers, filmmakers and producers? UC-Berkeley
should tell Coke to take a hike and that they are not welcome on campus!

Hchapot

Is there any fee for bottles and cans dumped into the UC trash stream?